RE: Beginning web development


Hello Joe,

You wrote:
>COBOL CGI is quicker to implement, but in
>my opinion a little less flexible, because all the user interface code is
>embedded in the COBOL programs.  With Java Server Pages, the JSPs actually
>format the data, kind of like the DDS for a display file.  You can change
>the look of your application without actually changing the COBOL code.

I can't this fallacy pass.  There is no more requirement for CGI programs
to embed HTML (regardless of language) than there was for Java to embed
HTML.  If you recall the history of servlets you'll find that is how they
started. Host Java code would write HTML to the the web server.  That was
silly for obvious reasons and the HTML was removed and abstracted via JSP
(and other techniques).

It is trivial for a CGI program written in RPG, COBOL, or whatever HLL
takes your fancy, to read the HTML from a file and use scan and replace to
insert dynamic data.  In essence that is exactly what JSPs do.  If you look
at the generated code you'll find they read the orginal HTML and scan for
magic markers and replace them with data from a Bean.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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